Politico gets a bunch of thinkers to predict changes.
Honestly, I was disappointed by this. A lot of wishful thinking it seemed to me.
Do we really have the industrial might we once had for a long term fight?
Tough question. Clearly we do not currently. The question is, do we still have the expertise to become a manufacturing giant? I don't know the answer to that. But consider that FDR saw things heating up and started moving the US to more and more of a war footing, prepping the ground, before the US was officially involved.
Ford famously produced a B-29 Liberator every 63 minutes. But the Willow Run plant did not even exist in 1939 when WWII broke out. They broke ground in 1940, began limited component production in 1941, started producing complete aircraft a year or two later, were plagued with quality and production problems into 1943 and finally were up and running at the famous 63 minutes per plane in 1944. And that was 63 minutes per plane, running 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. Roughly 160 bombers per week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run#Liberator_productionHitler and Stalin both thought it would take the US much, much longer to be an important arms manufacturer. Hitler's war plans were predicated on that bet. They were astounded not at the industrial might of the US in 1939, but at how fast it ramped up in just a few years.
So the question isn't whether we have that capacity today but if, faced with a crisis, could we create that capacity by 2025. And actually, I think we *are* facing a crisis, climate change, that is going to need to see a major reallocation of resources and conversion of large sectors of the economy, if not quite on the scale or urgency of defeating Hitler, but we do not have the will to do it.
